Waking up to iOS 7 and understanding that skeuomorphism is more than skin deep

on
The Model T Ford was a favourite example of Steve Jobs, but in design terms it echoes heavily the horse-drawn carriage just as today's electronic interfaces echo print (in more ways than just surface detail)

I've been struggling to understand the design logic of iOS 7 ever since screenshots from the beta were released, and the main hurdle has been to understand the home screen icons. This was until I had a revelatory moment reading this post on Medium by R.E. Warner (tweeted to my attention by @zcichy).


Seeing the new app store icon placed side by side with an optically adjusted version, I had a duck-rabbit moment, where I literally had to make my eyes shift register to see each as the correct version. In one register (my default register) the icon on the right (optically adjusted) was correct in the other register it was the one on the left that was correct.

The original comparison that Neven Mrgan made (cited  by Warner in 'When wrong does not apply')

It then struck me that skeuomorphism isn't just about apps connecting visually with physical objects in the world, but that the reason we see this new Ive grid as producing designs that are wrong is because they take no account of printing.

Designers have grown up with print, adding trim margins and spacings that take account of the margin of error involved in designing for print. It is a part of the eyes' muscle memory, something we'd never go against. In print we either full-bleed or we keep objects, and text in particular, nicely away from the edge so that a 3 mm variation either way goes unnoticed. This keeps us from looking like amateurs and produces good results.

In the digital world there is no trimming, you get exactly what you design. So you can push things closer to the edge without risk. But the muscle memory in our eyes doesn't automatically question or reason that the learning it did was from the print world, and it applies it indiscriminately to all worlds producing the negative reaction.

I'm now convinced that this is the root of my own strong reaction and I suggest that of many, and it leads me to predict that before long this fact will lead many other designs we currently see as right as wrong when our visual register shifts, and iOS 7 vision becomes the dominant.

Whether this view of skeuomorphism also accounts for reactions to the gradient fills, the overall neon colouring and transparency (all things incidentally that one typical steers clear of in print) is still to be seen. There might be some missteps, and over confidence in the new Ive grid, things the world isn't ready to embrace, but today's revelation makes it clear to me that spacing isn't one of them.

Endorse on Coderwall

Comments

Post a Comment